The Importance of “Hour of Code”

Technology is used in every waking moment of our lives. With tech such as computers, phones, tablets, wearable devices, and more, there has to be someone there to code and develop that technology. As technology continues to evolve, future opportunities for the younger generation will grow and knowledge of coding and programming languages will be important in the development of new technology. The big question is, how do we get children interested in learning and programming at a young age? The answer to that question may be as simple as the teaching program called “Hour of Code”.

What is Hour of Code?

Hour of Code is designed to help simplify and teach code to children so they can learn the basics of coding in a fun and interesting way. One way this is done is by using familiar characters from movies, such as Frozen, and turning the learning of code into a game.

What is appealing about Hour of Code is that you do not need to be an expert coder to teach it. In fact, you don’t need any prior knowledge of code because there are many guides and tutorials to help teach coding knowledge to children of all ages.

CollabraSpace Participates in Hour of Code

CollabraSpace started a summer program in 2013 called Camp CollabraSpace. This day camp was created with the intent to share technology with CollabraSpace employee’s children; the same types of technologies their parents are using every day, and to teach the importance of code. In Camp CollabraSpace, we utilized Hour of Code by using the fantastic site and original organizer of the program, Code.org. We decided to use Code.org because of how interesting and easy the site makes learning code.

Many of the children, boys and girls from ages 5 to 14, went past the hour and continued to play and learn on the site because of how interested they were in the coding. CollabraSpace will continue teaching an Hour of Code to our employees’ children this summer at our next Camp CollabraSpace and will continue to help develop their coding knowledge.

Even though Hour of Code is designed to help teach the basics of code to children, adults interested in learning code can take of advantage Code.org as well. When testing the many different coding education sites for the children at Camp CollabraSpace (Code.org, Scratch, and Hopscotch), several employees at CollabraSpace whom had no prior experience with coding took each site for a spin and found Code.org to be really fun and engaging for adults too. There are many activities at various levels of difficulty that continue to change and keep the learning fresh. No matter what age, games are always fun to play when learning! From the amount of fun both the children and adults had, Code.org comes highly recommended as a teaching tool for learning code and programming.